How To Convert From a VMware Image To Virtualbox Image

VirtualBox is a virtual emulator like VMWare workstation. It has many of the features VMWare has, as well as some of its own.

I really like new Opensource VirtualBox from Sun. It is light on resources. Here is a quick tip – you can convert a VMware virtual machine to a VirtualBox machine using qemu-img utility.

Install qemu

qemu-img is included with qemu package. You can install it by typing:$ sudo apt-get install qemu

Convert a VMWare Image to VirtualBox Image

Convert VMWare image called centos.vmdk to /tmp/centos.bin$ qemu-img convert centos.vmdk /tmp/centos.bin Now use VBoxManage to get back image in native format:$ VBoxManage convertdd /tmp/centos.bin centos.vdi

Posted by: Vivek Gite

The author is the creator of nixCraft and a seasoned sysadmin, DevOps engineer, and a trainer for the Linux operating system/Unix shell scripting. Get the latest tutorials on SysAdmin, Linux/Unix and open source topics via RSS/XML feed or weekly email newsletter.

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@Bryan I would NOT recommend it at a production level, because from my experience I believe VBox is just not stable enough or “old” enough to work. I personally love VMWare as a server, and I believe that VBox is (right now) for play. IMO

Nice post!! Thank you for sharing the tips. It could be my alternative solution when problem arise. I have experience on using VMWare in my company and VirtualBox in my research lab. I’m using XP as host and Red Hat 9 as guess in both environment. Both are running well. Just that some minor problem in VB when screen saver is triggered in RedHat 9, I’m not able to switch my cursor control back to host. Solution to this is pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del to bring up the task manager in XP, this will force the cursor control back to host. A bit cheated but it works!!